Entertainment

HOW TO: Turn Your Facebook Profile Photo Into a Video

Some Facebook users — myself formerly among them — are obsessive profile tweakers. We edit our list of interests. We reorganize our photo albums and experiment with awesome profile photo hacks. We weigh carefully whether we want to "Like" this Page or that, because we wonder how that information will be inferred. And we're always just a little bit, well, bored with our profiles.

Enter FlipYourProfile, a new Facebook app slash browser plugin that allows you to replace your profile photo with a video. That's right. You no longer have to have a boring still image in your profile photo box. You can have a moving, breathing, sound-generating profile video on loop.

The app was built by Cisco and DDB Singapore as a way of promoting the former's line of Flip video cameras.

The application has two catches: First, only those who have the plugin installed will be able to see your video, otherwise they'll just see your regular Facebook profile photo. Thus, if you want your friends to see your new profile video, you'll need to persuade them to install it (and perhaps upload a video to their own profiles as well). Secondly, an ad saying, "Amazing! You can post videos on your Facebook profile. Get the app to view my profile vid," will be automatically posted to your wall should you decide to upload a video, which is rather annoying.

Still interested? Follow these four steps to upload your own Facebook profile video.

Shoot and send video by e-mailing a video from your Flip Video cam to me@flipyourprofile.com, or by using the Profile Maker to shoot a video using your webcam or to upload an existing video (less than 10MB, .flv, .mp4, h.264 only).*

*Note: If you're using, for example, your iPhone to shoot video, you'll need to use a free file converter like Get Miro to convert your .mov file to one of the compatible formats. You should also shoot your video in horizontal mode; otherwise, it will appear sideways on your profile.

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